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Microsoft’s Bid to Make Outlook More than Email

Harvard Business Review

Email as we know it is changing—and so is Microsoft’s strategy for its cornerstone product, Outlook. Many successful platforms today have experienced this product-to-platform transition. Outlook’s transformation reinforces CEO Satya Nadella’s goal to “ reinvent productivity.” Grow mobile.

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NewTV Is the Antithesis of a Lean Startup. Can It Work?

Harvard Business Review

NewTV is the creation of Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose track record includes head of production at Paramount, chair of Walt Disney Studios, and cofounder of DreamWorks. Because the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. And it may work.

IPO 8
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What U.S. E-Commerce Can Learn from Its Global Copycats

Harvard Business Review

Every new market I look at seems to have an Amazon-style copycat — a website that looks, functions, and sells products a lot like a well-known online retailer. We were unable to capitalize on first mover advantage. But first mover advantage is a simplistic tenet of global strategy.

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It's Time to Cut Back on Social Media

Harvard Business Review

Clearly there is a first mover advantage in some cases: Chris Brogan developed a passionate following as an early blogger, and Guy Kawasaki jumped onboard Twitter and became a powerhouse there. For such a visual product, literally differentiated by its color, Pinterest is a terrific platform.

Media 10
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Growing, or Not, in an Age of Permanent Volatility

Harvard Business Review

In a recent Accenture study involving 1000 CFOs and CMOs across eight industries and a dozen countries in developed and emerging markets, 85 percent of executives expected their companies to grow at a rate equal to or significantly greater than global growth forecasts. Innovation focused on first-mover advantage, not price point.

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Strategic Choices Need to Be Made Simultaneously, Not Sequentially

Harvard Business Review

The CEO of a large Australian company called me to relay a particular strategy development problem his firm was facing, and ask for my advice. It turned out that Uber’s How to Win had a lot to do with building a first-mover advantage in markets like the U.S.; But it didn’t work in the Where to Play of China.

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Best Practices for Leading via Innovation

Harvard Business Review

Toyota's decade-long investment in its Prius sub-brand ultimately succeeded in strengthening the company's reputation as a respected product innovator while allowing Toyota to capture first-mover advantage in the fast-growing hybrid category. Enable organizational agility.